• Invading Iraq is part of the War on Terror. The Bush administration defines the "War on Terror" as "a protracted struggle against terrorists and states that aid terrorists." (link). As President Bush stated in September of 2001 to a joint session of Congress:
  Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
  According to this definition of the "War on Terror," invading Iraq would be considered a part of the war on terror if it could be proven that Saddam Hussein's regime harbored terrorists.

  Although Vice-President Cheney continues to harp on this, Secretary of State Colin Powell has made it clear that there is no evidence to demonstrate such a link. On January 8, 2004, Powell backed up what President Bush himself admitted in September of 2003:

  Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda. "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did." Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted ? and something administration officials have done little to discourage.
  As Mathew Levitt notes in a review of hawk Stephan's Hayes book The Connection, a work design to prove an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection:
  What evidence there is, Hayes notes, is "circumstantial and highly speculative." Instead, he points to the "unique threat" presented by the "potential collaboration" between Osama bin Laden and Hussein."
  Again, another potential collaboration based upon speculation. What about other terrorists that Iraq might have supported?

  Some hawks, including Daniel Drummond of The Fourth Rail, like to point to the Salman Pak training camp discovered in Iraq. However, as anyone who read the article on this camp would notice, it operated in far northern, both de jour and de facto Kurdish autonomous Iraq where Hussein could not possibly have had any control (check out the link, as it has one of the hundreds of bogus positive WMD tests that I am considering collecting for a public art piece).

  So what proof of Saddam's support of terrorists are we left with? That Saddam supports leaders of Palestinian organizations and Palestinian suicide bombers. I have to grant this, because it has been well documented.

  Then again, this was never how the case was presented. It was never "we need to invade Iraq because Saddam supports Palestinian suicide bombers." This is probably because many other powerful people in many other countries have offered far more support to such actions than Saddam ever has or could ever hope to give. Also, it is probably because such terrorists are a threat to Israel, and not to the United States. Most importantly, however, because placing Saddam's support for terrorists entirely within the specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict implies that it is necessary to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than to invade Iraq. Admitting that Saddam's support for terrorists is only support for Palestinian terrorists renders his role in the wider war on Terrorism a footnote of a footnote.

• Prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction As has now become clear, Hussein's regime either had no weapons of mass destruction at all or virtually no weapons of mass destruction. As David Kay, the Bush appointed head of the search team in Iraq stated in a June 5 interview with the BBC:
  Anyone out there holding - as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said - the prospect that ISG [Iraqi Search Group] is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction are really delusional.... There is nothing there.... There are not actual stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction.
  That Saddam Hussein had the potential to reconstitute a weapons program was not one of the rationales used to support the war. This is because every single autocratic tyrant in the world has the potential to one day have a weapons program, and would not make Saddam special. The argument was that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons, and it is now clear that he did not.

• Lack of inspections. At the time we invaded Iraq, inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. In fact, while the lack of weapons inspectors in Iraq was one of the five primary reasons given for the war, the Bush administration actually asked inspectors to pull out of Iraq so that the war could begin. Clearly, Bush the administration was not being honest when it used this as a reason for war. It did not care about inspections.

• Removal of the Hussein regime will help prevent the wider spread of weapons and terror Of course, if Saddam did not have WMD's, it is pretty clear that he did not have the ability to spread weapons widely. If his support for terrorism was restricted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is pretty clear that he was not spreading terrorism beyond places that it already existed. If inspectors were on the ground, it was pretty clear that we could monitor his "potential to reconstitute" his weapons program. In other words, containment was working pretty damn well against Saddam Hussein, and the three major threats trumped up in order to justify preemption were not problems when preemption took place.

  This is the source of the disagreement between Bush and Kerry. Kerry argued that it was necessary to use the threat of force in order to get inspectors to return to Iraq. He wanted 1441 and got it. However, after that was secured he did not see a reason to go further, since the resolution was a prime example of a successful containment policy.

• Saddam Hussein is evil With the previous four reasons for war now widely discredited in the nation at large, thus discrediting Iraq as a justifiable case for preemptive war, the hawk case for war now relies almost entirely on this "humanitarian" rationale for going to war. Now, the vast majority of people who argue that the war was justified do so exclusively on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a profoundly evil dictator and his oppressive actions needed to be stopped.

  Well, this rationale has a point: Saddam Hussein was evil and stopping him from gassing the Kurds or slaughtering the Shiites would have been justifiable. However, we did not stop Hussein in the midst of one of his genocidal acts against either the Kurds or the Shiites. We did not stop such an impending act. In fact, most of the time when he was committing those acts (1980-1993), either he was our ally or we had encouraged the uprising that led to mass slaughter. We gave military aid to Saddam during his war with Iran, and we provided him with the chemical weapons that he used against both the people of Iran and his own people. In fact, by our own definition of the War on Terror, this makes us a state that supported terrorism thus could be justifiably invaded.

  We did not stop Hussein from committing any such acts. Instead, we actually facilitated many of them. More than a decade after the acts had taken place, to use such a justification for war is at best hypocritical and far too late, and at worst deeply cynical, disingenuous, and an attempt to wash our owns hands of our guilt.

  We are going to prosecute many of the people involved in such acts as war criminals. This is a good thing. However, I would feel a lot better about it, and be a lot more accepting of the hawk argument, if we were not hypocritical and actually prosecuted all of the responsible parties, including members of our own government. Anyone who actively facilitated Hussein's murderous plans should be prosecuted, and that list would include Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Only if we attempt to bring all of the people who we know are responsible to justice will this aspect of the hawk argument have any validity.

Three nearly primary reasons

• Liberation of the Iraqi people There is something undeniably noble about this rationale. In fact, if I believed it were possible, I might even be in favor of it. However, the fact remains that no country ever has invaded another country that has no history of democracy and brought democracy to it at the point of a gun barrel. We are found of pointing out what we did for Europe in WWII, but every country that became a democracy after our liberation was either already a democracy before it was conquered by Germany, or it was a Germany and was a democracy before Hitler. Count me in with Edmund Burke on this one. It is not possible to bring democracy to a country that has never known it at the barrel of a gun. This has never happened, and it never will. Our mission to bring democracy to Iraq has not succeeded yet, will not succeed after the sham handover, and in fact will never succeed. It is just not possible to make a country that has never been democratic become democratic by occupying it militarily. This is a noble, though quixotic goal that has already cost the lives of thousands. It is high time we abandoned this national myth.

• Broken promises by failing to comply with United Nations resolutions Iraq was the third largest violator of United Nations resolutions (with Morocco a close fourth). If invading Iraq were justified on this ground, then it would follow that invading Israel, Turkey, and probably Morocco are also justified (Warning: PDF file). If any hawk is willing to argue that invading Turkey and Israel are justified, I will go ahead and assent to his or her position being coherent. In fact, as of eighteen months ago:
  There are more than 100 U.N. Security Council resolutions being violated by member states. Iraq is in violation of at most 16 of them. Ironically, Washington has effectively blocked the enforcement of U.N. Security Council resolutions against many other nations, since they include such countries as Morocco, Indonesia, Israel and Turkey that are allied with the United States.
  Clearly, the Bush administration does not care about when countries violate Security Council resolutions. That it used the violation of a resolution in order to justify war in this case is nothing more than cynical convenience.
• Iraq poses and imminent threat to the safety of the United States Without WMD's, means to propel WMD's, connection to terrorists outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an army that withered in the face of a fraction of possible US military might, it is hard to imagine what threat Saddam Hussein posed. Iraq and Saddam Hussein were not a threat because the containment policies of previous administrations were successful.

Secondary Reasons

• Because we can This is not a justification that many hawks would readily use in their defense. In fact, as Largio notes on page 154:
  This indirect referencing is likely the most controversial. No one ever comes out and says those words. Yet, some talk about the weakness of the Iraqi military, and the lack of loyalty among the Iraqi people. Commenting on the dire circumstances and the lack of military might implies that such a liability is a factor in the equation some way.
  Perhaps a better way of putting this argument is that "Iraq is weak, and we will face few consequences if we invade because of their weakness." This notion that even if the arguments in favor of war are wrong that there will be few consequences has been proven wrong time and time again. More than 12,000 non-Iraqi military people are dead (no one knows how many Iraqi military fatalities there were), and tens of thousands wounded. The consequences have indeed been severe.

• Unfinished business from the first Gulf War A rule of thumb in a just war: invading a country to fix your own mistake disqualifies the invasion from being just. The notion that we should invade now because we made a mistake not finishing Hussein's regime in 1991 implies that any historical wrong we have done to any country can be justifiably fixed by invading that country.

• Disarmament of all weapons inside Iraq is necessary Some have argued that even though there were no large stockpiles of weapons, we are not safe unless Iraq has absolutely no weapons at all? Even the Balloons of Mass Destruction are dangerous? Really? They are a threat no matter how weak their arsenal is? All of their weapons, no matter how weak, much be destroyed? Count me in as not feeling the need to invade a country with one Sarin gas shell.

  As much as hawks still try to push this idea, the point was never that Iraq had any weapons t all, but that they had a significant enough arsenal to be a threat to the United States. It does not matter whether Iraq had an extremely small amount of weapons: it only matters if Iraq had enough weapons to pose an imminent threat to the US. Reread Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, or Colin Powell's presentation to the United nations. The pro-war case is not that there was a single nerve-gas shell somewhere ("the single shell will kill us all!"), but that there was a WMD arsenal that could do severe damage to the US right now or in the very near future. As David Kay makes clear in the interview with the BBC that I linked in reason number two, those claims were clearly false.

• Connection to Al-Qaeda. Dealt with during my rebuttal to the first reason "War on Terror."

• Safety of the World If the region was not in danger, and the US was not in danger, then the world was not in danger as well. Without the weapons, without the connections, and with inspectors on the ground, Saddam was not a threat to his neighbors or to the US. He was also not a threat to the world.

Minor reasons rarely used

• History is an ideal directive that commands us to invade Iraq No problem comrade, although it is funny seeing wingers use Marxist dogma to justify their polices. The historical dialectic commands that we continue the inevitable human march toward greater freedom by invading Iraq. No wonder this rationale was dumped almost immediately after Bush (and once again, Lieberman) first used it (although Rice brought it up again later). History commands us to invade Iraq? History does not command us to do anything, quite frankly. However, this is a minor argument and not one hawks ever used with great frequency, so there is no need to swell upon it.

• Revenge for attempting to kill the first President Bush Ahhh. Nothing like sending nearly one thousand of your own citizens to their deaths because someone tried to kill one of your former leaders ten years ago. Montezuma would be proud. It is important to remember that when Hussein ordered the attempt on Bush I's life, Bush I was already a former President. I would say this reminds me of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand justification for war, but at least ADF had the potential to one day rule Austria.

• War will help oil continue to flow westward Considering how desperate most hawks have been to deny that oil is a prime rationale behind the invasion of Iraq, I doubt there are few hawks who would like to defend this point. However, it was used, if only sparsely. To counter it, I will simply point at oil prices more than one year after the invasion, and the degree to which oil seems to be flowing westward as a result of the war. Better yet, I will actually quote hawks on this claim:

  Blair: Iraq War Not About Oil
  Wolfowitz Reasserts War Not About Oil
  Senior officials claim that the administration is preoccupied with military planning, not with oil.

  Ok, fine. I agree. Oil would be a pretty disgusting reason to go to war, and I am glad that the hawks agree with this.

• Iraq is a threat to the region Not anymore, as I argued in reason number four, containment clearly was working against Hussein. His weapons were destroyed. His ability to support terrorism was limited to Palestine. Inspectors were on the ground. Further, as the invasion clearly demonstrated, his military was extremely weak. Containment was working and he was no longer a threat to the region. This was in thanks in no small part to Clinton and Bush's father.

• Iraq is unique, since it is the most dangerous threat to the world today Wow. It is hard to imagine that a country that apparently posed very little threat to anyone is the most dangerous country in the world today. This must be an era of great peace. Not having chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons makes you more dangerous that the dozens of countries that possess such weapons. Having a weak military, something hawks regularly admitted, makes you far more dangerous than the dozens of countries with stronger militaries. Having no connections to terrorists outside of Palestine makes you almost as dangerous as, well, the Palestinians? Everything about China, its weapons, its population, its military, its economy, its connections, are more than one hundred times the size of the Iraqi equivalent, and Rumsfeld wanted us to believe that Iraq posed the unique, most dangerous threat to the world? Holy fucking shit that it wrong. Iraq was not the greatest threat to world stability, not even close.

• Peace with be preserved by invading Iraq and thereby preventing Iraq from invading others. Wow. Just wow. Starting a war to prevent a war. Here is a newsflash: if you start a war to prevent a war, then you are still at war and you have failed to prevent war.

• By oppressing its people and threatening others with terrorist acts, Saddam Hussein's regime is a threat to freedom We are repeatedly told by hawks that there is no freedom in the region, and that liberating Iraq will be the first step toward changing the region. But if there is no freedom in the region, how can Saddam Hussein be a threat to it? You cannot threaten the existence of something that does not exist, unless the middle East is really a haven of democracy after all. Further, as I have argued in a previous article, we do not really want to change the region anyway. This reason is just another cynical, convenient justification for war.

• Stimulation of the economy ala WWII This reason was only used once and, in defense of the Bush administration (that might be the first time I have ever written such words), it was by a columnist rather than anyone in actual power. The colossal stupidity of such a claim does not need to be thoroughly rebuked here, even thought the notion that war is good for the economy is an urban legend in need of debunking. However, let it suffice to say that during WWII the US economy was slightly aided by the complete economic destruction of all major international competitors. With France, Germany, Japan, Italy, China, the Soviet Union and England all lying in ruins, there remained little competition for US labor, goods, services and capital basically anywhere in the world. As the destruction of the trade towers showed Americans, when the bombing happens on your own shores you pay a very severe economic price. Going to war with Iraq did nothing to damage the economies of today's major competitors. All it did was destroy the economy of an already nearly destroyed economy.

• Preserve the relevance of the UN by enforcing its resolutions As I noted in my rebuttal to reason number seven, considering the actions of Morocco, Israel and Turkey, clearly the Bush administration does not care about when countries violate Security Council resolutions. That it used the violation of a resolution in order to justify war in this case is nothing more than cynical convenience. Only the United Nations Security Council has the authority to enforce its own resolutions and 1441 was not a resolution that authorized invasion. Enforcing a resolution of the UN without UN consent simply makes you an international vigilante. We might as well invade India because we do not believe India is properly enforcing its traffic laws, and the Indian Department of Motor Vehicles is doing nothing to stop the continuing violations.

• Commitment to the safety of our children If Saddam Hussein was not a threat to us, it is hard to imagine how a senior citizen would one day be a threat to our children. Not only is such a claim purely speculative, it defies the rather obvious notion that Saddam would have died eventually. It also assumes that invading Iraq will not increase hatred and, eventually, acts of terrorism against the United States. This brings us to the next reason...

• Gain favor in the Middle East by protecting other countries form Saddam Hussein Well, let's test this. Here was the Arab opinion of America before the invasion, in a Zogby opinion poll of the region conducted in October of 2002:

  	   Unfavorable Opinion of America
  Kuwait			 48
  Jordan			 61
  Egypt			 76
  Saudi Arabia		 87
  United Arab Emirates	 87

  Other nations were included in the poll, but for now these will do. Suffice to say that Kuwait had the highest opinion of America of the entire region, even though unfavorables (48%) still outnumbered favorables (41%). So, before the war, most Arabs did not like America very much. Has that changed now? Take a look at the Pew Global Attitudes Project report from Mid May:
  A year after the war in Iraq, discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished. Opinion of the United States in France and Germany is at least as negative now as at the war's conclusion, and British views are decidedly more critical. Perceptions of American unilateralism remain widespread in European and Muslim nations, and the war in Iraq has undermined America's credibility abroad. Doubts about the motives behind the U.S.-led war on terrorism abound, and a growing percentage of Europeans want foreign policy and security arrangements independent from the United States. Across Europe, there is considerable support for the European Union to become as powerful as the United States.

  In the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, anger toward the United States remains pervasive, although the level of hatred has eased somewhat and support for the war on terrorism has inched up. Osama bin Laden, however, is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%) and Morocco (45%). Even in Turkey, where bin Laden is highly unpopular, as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable. Majorities in all four Muslim nations surveyed doubt the sincerity of the war on terrorism. Instead, most say it is an effort to control Mideast oil and to dominate the world.

  OK, the countries in the region now tend to only favor Osama Bin Laden over the US by a 2 to 1 margin, and the region is slightly les hostile than when the war broke out (a light decline from an original spike). However, it certainly does not appear as though the US has "gained favor" at all. We are still widely hated in the region, and the war against Iraq is the most immediate cause of the hatred.

• Send a message to other rogue states by making an example of Iraq Although a minor reason at the time, hawks like to make a big deal out of this reason now. Specifically, they argue that invading Iraq led Libya and Iran to come closer to complying with international law and weapons inspectors. However, this is preposterous. The invasion of Iraq has made it impossible for the United States to invade any other country of significant size or military strength (by significant military strength, I mean roughly half the size and military power of Iraq). We barely have enough troops to continue the occupation of Iraq itself, and everyone knows it (and that link counts numbers from a year ago, before this sort of thing started happening). Iran and Libya could not fallen into greater compliance with international law because of the threat of force because the invasion of Iraq has greatly reduced, if not entirely removed, the potential of the United States to successfully invade either country.

  If anything, that Iran and Libya were able to come into greater compliance with international law even when our potential to use force against those countries has been greatly reduced shows just how unnecessary and tragic the war with Iraq is. With less force and better diplomacy, we succeeded to a greater extent than we did during the entire twelve-year bombing intermission we took between invasions of Iraq. Military dictatorships may be evil, but they are aware of military capability and know full well that if we are occupying Iraq we are unable to make a huge deployment anywhere else. Because we are occupying Iraq, no one is scared of us anymore (except Iraqis).

• Saddam Hussein Hates the US This rationale was only used once, and by everyone's favorite Democrat, Joseph Lieberman. So what if he hates us? That does not justify invasion. If it did, than every invasion in the history of the world would be justified, since it is almost certain that the leader of any country being invaded hated the invaders.

• Iraq is in violation of International law See reason number seven, "Broken promises by failing to comply with United Nations Resolutions."

And there's more

Here are some points for hawks to rebut, if they feel the need.

Invading Iraq has made us less safe from terrorism. Since Saddam Hussein was not a threat, taking him out did not reduce the threats against us. However, as has been previously established:

• Our current troop deployment in Iraq makes it impossible for us to make a large troop deployment anywhere else, thus decreasing our ability to respond to threats.
• It has increased hostility toward the United States, thus increasing the number of people willing to fight on the other side of the War on Terror.
• It has weakened the power of international institutions that can be used to fight terrorism.
• It has allowed us to self-inflict nearly another 9/11 on ourselves, with almost 1,000 Americans dead and several billion dollars spent.
• It has eliminated the effective policy of containment, which successfully rendered Saddam impotent in the first place.
• It has eroded our standing in potentially helping to solve to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• It has caused us to violate our own principles, now that we abuse prisoners and detain people without charges.
• It has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people.